Alice Sheets Marriott,92, who began working at her...

Deaths Elsewhere

April 19, 2000

Alice Sheets Marriott,92, who began working at her husband's root beer stand and helped turn it into a worldwide hotel chain, died Monday of natural causes at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, Marriott International said yesterday.

It was 1927 when she married J. Willard Marriott and went to work as bookkeeper at a Washington root beer stand he had opened. A few months later, as weather cooled and business waned, Mrs. Marriott got recipes from the chef at the Mexican Embassy and began cooking spicy food.

The stand was renamed The Hot Shoppe and became a chain that eventually grew to 100 stores in 11 states. The last one, in Marlow Heights, closed in December.

The Marriotts eventually branched out to other businesses, principally hotels, and Marriott today comprises five companies with combined annual sales of $20 billion.

Mrs. Marriott was born in Salt Lake City on Oct. 19, 1907, and was a graduate of the University of Utah. The Washington resident was trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and did charitable work.

Her husband died in 1985.

She is survived by two sons, J. W. Marriott Jr. and Richard E. Marriott; eight grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren.

Bessie Thomas, 112, who lived through two world wars and used her centenarian fame to share her principles of hard work, saving money and treating others with respect, died Saturday in Cincinnati.

In an interview with the Associated Press in June, Ms. Thomas, known as "Ms. Bessie," said she never drank alcohol, believed in eating lightly and stayed away from movies, preferring to sing old religious hymns. Ms. Thomas never drove a car or flew in a plane. She helped care for relatives, but never married. She had a sixth-grade education, but she said she never stopped reading and learning.

Najm Al-Sadoon, 83, an Iraqi journalist jailed in the 1980s on charges of spying for Saudi Arabia, died in a Baghdad prison. The Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat published his obituary Sunday.

Mr. Al-Sadoon was the Baghdad correspondent of the Saudi daily Al-Riyad when he was arrested in 1986 and charged with spying for the oil-rich kingdom.

A revolutionary court later sentenced him to death, but President Saddam Hussein commuted it to life imprisonment in an apparent bid to appease Saudi Arabia, among Baghdad's supporters during the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war.

Joseph Burton DeLaCruz, 62, former president of the National Congress of American Indians and head of the Quinault Indian Nation for more than two decades, died Sunday in Seattle of a heart attack.

Mr. DeLaCruz gained attention in battles with state and federal agencies over timber cutting, fishing rights and tribal sovereignty. He also led the drive for tribes to obtain line-item appropriations from Congress rather than allocations through the federal bureaucracy, increasing tribal control over police, health, land use, education and other services.

Auguste R. Lindt, 94, a Swiss diplomat who served as United Nations high commissioner for refugees in the 1950s, died during the weekend in Geneva.

Mr. Lindt was appointed to head the U.N. refugee agency in 1956, and immediately began to mobilize an assistance program for about 200,000 Hungarians who fled to Austria and Yugoslavia to escape Soviet repression.

Justice W. Shepro, 74, a Chicago-area attorney and businessman who became one of the nation's leading collectors of antique clocks, died March 30 in an automobile accident in Chicago.

Using money he made from real estate investments and other business ventures, he became the owner of one of the world's largest collections of antique clocks, some dating from the 15th century.

Obituaries

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